James Bluemel, the filmmaker behind Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, first thought of the idea for Once Upon a Time in Space after Russia invaded Ukraine.

“The whole world ostracizes Russia. Their bank accounts are frozen. No one's doing any dealing with them. All except in one area, which is up on the International Space Station [the ISS] where this relationship between America and Russia continued,” Bluemel told me.

Bluemel recognized the ISS as a “brilliantly symbolic physical symbol of human unity,” but had no idea how it came to be.

He began to research the station’s origins, and Once Upon a Time in Space, a four-part PBS documentary that premieres on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, is the end result. In it, Bluemel talks with astronauts, cosmonauts, and their family members about their experiences with their countries’ respective space programs, including working and living on the ISS.

The doc gives us a personal view of the creation and running of the station, and it also conveys humanity’s ability, as Bluemel described it, to “put aside their differences and work together and do something that was extraordinarily complicated, probably more complicated than anything that humans have ever done before.”

To do that, the filmmaker worked to humanize the astronauts and “see into their souls.” He did so in part by talking with their family members, making the astronauts more relatable to those of us who’ve never left Earth’s gravity well. You see in this the first episode,  “America First,” which centers on the space race with the Soviet Union, including when the U.S. established the Space Shuttle program and NASA encouraged people of all genders and racial backgrounds to apply.

That episode ends after the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the Soviet Union launching the space station Mir. The second episode, “The Russian Thing,” picks up after the Soviet Union falls.

In the early 1990s, Russia’s space program was faltering until it got financial support via the Shuttle-Mir Program (or Mir-Shuttle Program, if you’re talking to the Russians), where the U.S. provided funds to Russia in exchange for sending U.S. astronauts to Mir.

“In that program, the role of the [U.S.] astronaut was to be a guest, not to cause difficulties for their hosts, the Russian cosmonauts,” astronaut Michael Foale told me. Being a guest also meant that the U.S. astronauts and their families were expected to “learn the mores, the customs, and all the accepted behaviors of the host. And that meant learning Russian.”

Foale, along with other U.S. astronauts, including Jerry Linenger, moved with their families to Russia’s Star City a year or so before heading to Mir. We hear both of their accounts in Once Upon a Time in Space, and Foale shared some additional details of his time there with me. “Food was difficult to obtain in Star City, to get what I would call Western food,” he said. “We had a 1-year-old baby and a 4-year-old girl, and to get food and formula and all that kind of stuff was hard.”

Foale and his family, however, became good friends with some of the Russians there. He didn’t spend much time, however, with the two cosmonauts he would be on the Mir with: Aleksander “Sasha” Lazutkin and Vasily Tsibliyev. “I was trying to figure out where am I going to be with this crew. I didn't know how good my Russian was going to be. And I looked at it as if I was being sent to the Gulag or Siberia.”

Given that perspective, it’s no surprise that Foale was nervous when he first got to Mir, where Lazutkin and Tsibliyev already resided with Linenger. The cosmonauts, however, literally rolled out a red carpet (a red stripe about a foot wide and 30 feet long), and the welcoming was a warm one. When Linenger left with the shuttle crew, Foale gradually settled in, in no small part because Lazutkin had the empathy to invite him one day to tea. He got better at speaking Russian, and became a part of the crew, even more so after the three survived a cargo ship colliding with Mir and had to work with to re-right the station’s orbit to save the station and their lives.

Foale hasn’t seen Lazutkin face-to-face for over a decade, though he was able to reconnect with him via electronic communications during the making of the documentary. Unfortunately, their last direct communication was last November. Lazutkin explains Once Upon a Time in Space, however, that their connection remains strong: “Michael came into my orbit and has remained in my heart… we don’t meet that often. Very seldom, in fact. Very, very seldom. But I always know that Michael lives on this planet. I know him. He knows me. And that makes me feel good.”

The last two parts of the documentary, “Politics Always Wins” and “Friends Forever” center on the creation and running of the ISS, and the failed attempt of U.S. investors who, in the early 2000s, wanted to commercialize the aging Mir. Those commercial efforts, housed under a company called MirCorp led by Walt Anderson and Carlos “Gus” Gardellini, were publicly mocked at the time.

“When I had heard about them, I thought they were going to be crazy venture capitalist Americans,” Bluemel said about Anderson and Gardellini. “But when I interviewed them and put them in the chair and spoke to them at length, I completely changed my opinion about that. I thought they were visionaries. They saw something which no one else did. They were just 25 years too early.”

The commercialization of the Mir failed, and the Russian station fell into the ocean in 2001. The ISS — a collaboration of five space agencies across 15 countries — was a success, and humans have continuously been up in the space station since November 2, 2000.

The ISS is set to continue through 2030, and with it a thin thread of collaboration between the U.S. and Russia remains. U.S. astronauts, however, now get there differently after NASA’s Space Shuttle program ended in 2011. The country first paid Russia to send up its astronauts, but that arrangement became strained after Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. Currently, NASA pays Elon Musk’s SpaceX an estimated $90 million per astronaut to send them to the ISS, proof in point that Anderson and Gardellini’s MirCorp were merely too early with their idea.

Four years from now, NASA is also paying SpaceX almost $1 billion to plunge the ISS into the sea. “I think it's a real shame that… if the Space Station is de-orbited in 2030, there's nothing to replace it in terms of that symbol of humanity that exists right now,” said Bluemel.

Foale agreed and doesn’t want to see the ISS fall into the sea. “We, as in humanity, should just take that big tug that Elon Musk is being paid [almost $1 billion for], and that tug should not fire backwards. It should fire forwards. When it fires forwards, it will lift the ISS into a higher orbit, not a lower orbit, and it will be there for at least a few hundred years.”

What the ISS will leave us, regardless of what happens to the space station, is proof that humanity can do great things. NASA’s Ginger Kerrick explains it well at the end of Once Upon a Time in Space:

“World leaders are not interested in things that benefit the human race,” she says. “They’re interested in things that benefit their nation. But for a little while, I lived in a world that didn’t operate that way, and it was beautiful. And any of us that have lived that life really believe there is more we can accomplish together.”

Once Upon a Time in Space premieres Tuesdays, July 14 through August 4, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET on PBS, PBS.org, and the PBS app.